If America were a painting, it would almost certainly be a self-portrait.
Ours is a nation obsessed with depicting and interpreting itself, usually with the boldest of brushstrokes. We’ve claimed an American way, an American creed, an American idea, an American experiment, an American dream, even an American century. Our political battles do not center only on who is right or wrong but on whose positions best reflect the nation’s professed values. “That’s not who we are” is our harshest burn.
In our most back-patting moments, that self-portrait has a one-word caption: exceptional. We tell ourselves that we are the world’s last and best hope, unique among nations, chosen by God, exempt from history, on a mission befitting a “shining city upon a hill,” as Ronald Reagan put it in his 1989 Oval Office farewell.
Now is not a back-patting moment. Americans’ confidence in vital government institutions — the military, the judiciary, the electoral system — ranks lowest among the world’s rich nations, and satisfaction with the way our democracy is working is the weakest it has been in the four decades Gallup has tracked it. The coming presidential election feels more existential than exceptional, as did the one before it and the one before that. No wonder Americans alternate between hailing our ideals and deploring how we fail to live up to them or denouncing those ideals for not delivering the exceptional nation we desire.
But the reality or falsity of American exceptionalism is not a measurable, observable or unambiguous fact, no matter how confidently or derisively we invoke the term or how brightly Reagan’s metaphor still glitters. To claim American exceptionalism is to assert a political or cultural belief and to engage in an endless argument, one which our political leaders are compelled to join — whether extolling the city that is, pining for one that was or imagining the one yet to be.
In late 2016, during his final weeks as vice president, Joe Biden decried the coarse presidential campaign the nation had just witnessed. “So much for the shining city on the hill,” he said. Yet on Friday, the day after his painful debate performance, Biden called the United States “the finest and most unique nation in the world,” the only one built not on ethnicity, geography or religion but on the ideal of human equality. Donald Trump, for his part, has gone from praising American exceptionalism (“really a great term”) to dismissing it (“I don’t like the term, I’ll be honest with you”) to hailing it again (“America is the greatest and most exceptional nation in the history of the world”) to claiming during the debate that, under Biden, “we’ve become like a third world nation, and it’s a shame.” His version of American exceptionalism is about beating the world, not leading it.
President Barack Obama told the graduates of West Point in 2014 that he believed in the nation’s exceptionalism “with every fiber of my being” and has lauded American values, including free speech and equality, “that, though imperfect, are exceptional.” His exceptionalism is more self-critical, regarding the American story as a struggle to live up to the truths of the Declaration of Independence, truths that may be self-evident but are hardly self-fulfilling.
As a presidential candidate in 2000, George W. Bush declared that God and history had chosen America as “a model to the world,” though, after Sept. 11, 2001, just modeling virtue would not suffice. “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands,” Bush said in his second inaugural address, a justification to export that liberty via aircraft carrier if necessary.
Discussions of exceptionalism may seem obligatory among today’s candidates and yesterday’s presidents, but it was Reagan who cemented exceptionalism in the political vernacular. Throughout his two terms, the 40th president invoked “A Model of Christian Charity,” a sermon by John Winthrop, the Puritan lawyer and governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who declared in 1630 that “we shall be as a city upon a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us.” Winthrop drew on the Gospel of Matthew, in which Jesus told his followers, “You are the light of the world; a city set on a hill cannot be hidden.” Reagan channeled Winthrop’s formulation, forever burnishing it with one memorable adjective.
Reagan’s city “hummed with commerce and creativity,” he said, and his tenure in office had left it “more prosperous, more secure and happier.” The city stood tall, proud and, yes, “shining” for all the world to see. There were other passages that seemed written for a national anthology — Reagan referred repeatedly to the “great rediscovery” of American values that had occurred during his term, for instance — but it was the shining city that captured the self-congratulatory ethos of the time, an era that would soon proclaim the end of history, witness the fall of the Berlin Wall and affirm the indispensability of a single superpower.
The president’s speech was an exercise in “cinematic nationalism,” writes Daniel T. Rodgers, a historian at Princeton, in his 2018 book, “As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon.” The description is apt because the former Hollywood actor skillfully adapted Winthrop’s script for a new audience and time. The president celebrated a rich and powerful America, a “great nation” that is a “magnet” to the world, a country that if true to itself could trust that “the future will always be ours.” Stirring sentiments, for sure, but largely unrelated to those of the original sermon.
Winthrop emphasized community over individualism, solidarity over self-interest. He warned his people not to seek worldly greatness for themselves or their descendants, lest they suffer the wrath of God and “perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it.” Being a city upon a hill promised not future glory but relentless scrutiny. “If we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us,” Winthrop went on, “we shall be made a story and byword through the world.”
A city on a hill is not prideful; it is exposed. “The eyes of all people would be upon the New England Puritans’ project,” Rodgers writes, “but less in admiration than in skeptical anticipation of its missteps.” Reagan may have enshrined Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” in the American canon as a statement of progress and liberty, but he took liberties in the process.
He knew what he was doing. In the years before his presidency, Reagan often emphasized the cautionary spirit of the sermon, as he argued that campus radicalism and an ever-expanding government threatened the city on a hill. Speaking at the second Conservative Political Action Conference in 1975, after heavy Republican losses in the 1974 midterms, Reagan lamented the “disastrous” election results and cautioned that “if we fail to keep our rendezvous with destiny or, as John Winthrop said in 1630, ‘deal falsely with our God,’ we shall be made ‘a story and a byword throughout the world.’” Americans, he said, were “hungry to feel once again a sense of mission and greatness.”
Such warnings suited a time when Watergate and Vietnam were eroding the country’s post-World War II triumphalism. “Today, the belief in American exceptionalism has vanished with the end of empire, the weakening of power, the loss of faith in the nation’s future,” the sociologist Daniel Bell wrote in 1975. Bell’s essay, titled “The End of American Exceptionalism,” may have found validation when President Jimmy Carter declared a “crisis of confidence” in the United States, but Reagan soon delivered an about-face. If the 1970s heralded exceptionalism’s end, the 1980s proclaimed its restoration. “The imminence of potential failure, once so prominent in Reagan’s mind, silently fell away,” Rodgers writes. From a nation on the precipice to a city on a hill — funny what winning an election or two will do.
This does not mean that the Great Communicator was necessarily duplicitous in how he harnessed Winthrop’s sermon. Remaking a text for a new moment, however self-serving the impulse, is typical for a country in which national identity is not just lived out but written down — in a governor’s sermon or a president’s farewell, in a declaration of self-evident truths or a rule book ordained and established to perfect a young union. “No text ends up as it began. None escapes history,” Rodgers writes. “In the very act of reading a text, cherishing, possessing or rejecting it, its meaning is remade. It is, inescapably, always under construction.”
This is true of Winthrop’s sermon, and of the nation it has come to describe.
Reagan may have popularized “A Model of Christian Charity” and re-energized the notion of American exceptionalism for the political arena, but it was the political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset who attempted to measure America’s distinctiveness against that of other nations. In his 1996 book “American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword,” Lipset concluded that the United States was indeed a global outlier, though not always in a good way. “We are the worst as well as the best,” he wrote, “depending on which quality is being addressed.”
The negative traits Lipset identified include income inequality, elevated crime, low political engagement, adamant litigiousness and a moralizing, intolerant streak, all of which, paradoxically, flow from “the norms and behavior of an open democratic society that appear so admirable.” Lipset contended that the American creed — which he defined as a mix of liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism and laissez-faire — “fosters a high sense of personal responsibility, independent initiative and voluntarism even as it also encourages self-serving behavior, atomism and a disregard for communal good.”
In other words, the downside to the United States doesn’t just coexist with the upside; it is inextricable from it. How are the accounts settled between upside and downside, between possibilities and disappointments? American exceptionalism may be a double-edged sword, but it’s not always clear which edge cuts deeper.
Modern proponents of American exceptionalism have pointed to U.S. might, wealth and influence as evidence of the concept’s power. The 2011 film “A City Upon a Hill: The Spirit of American Exceptionalism,” hosted by Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the House, and his wife, Callista Gingrich, is a good example. The production praises American values of self-government, entrepreneurship and individualism and links them to tangible successes like the U.S. space program, Silicon Valley innovation and victory in World War II. It also criticizes Obama for supposedly minimizing American exceptionalism and harming it with redistributionist policies, and even features Trump explaining that he followed his father into real estate because his American dream of playing pro baseball wouldn’t pay well enough. (“I made a good decision,” the future president concluded.)
Attempts to prove America’s exceptionalism based on cross-country comparisons and lists of achievements miss an essential point: Being bigger, stronger or richer are different spots along the same continuum; they are disparities in degree, not in kind. “Whether measured by the size of navies, armaments, gross domestic product or any other aspect of quantitative national attainment,” such differences do not prove national exceptionalism, Ian Tyrrell, a historian at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, writes in his 2021 book, “American Exceptionalism: a New History of an Old Idea.”
The Gingrich documentary assails intellectuals who suggest that the United States may lose its perch atop the heap, but would receding into a less dominant global role mean our political ideals were no longer exceptional? Does China become exceptional and the United States cease to be so when the former surpasses the latter on key economic statistics? Mere size, Tyrrell emphasizes, does not imply “a nation set in a separate category, with unique moral and political ideals.”
David A. Bell, a historian at Princeton, spurns Gingrich’s arguments as a “cudgel” used to question the patriotism of his opponents and argues that a uniquely American exceptionalism makes “little analytical sense.” But he also writes that sweeping narratives about our distinctive character have at times emphasized “what Americans saw as their best qualities and their moral duties, giving them a standard to live up to.” Such narratives may not fulfill that role today, Bell writes, but he nonetheless leaves an opening for an exceptionalism that is not just self-serving or politicized but aspirational. (The fact that he is the son of Daniel Bell, who wrote of exceptionalism’s end nearly five decades earlier, offers cross-generational proof of the concept’s persistence.)
Lauding our exceptional nature may not deliver exceptional behavior, of course, and it may not render America anything other than exceptionally smug. But aspirational exceptionalism may be the most attractive version of the idea — focused on political ideals rather than material achievements, on status that is earned rather than claimed, on exceptionalism that is less about being something than about striving to become it.
But striving to become what? Winthrop had one possible answer. Morals and ideals are at the center of his message; his views on inequality, solidarity and love make up the bulk of the sermon’s 6,000-plus words. Some people are rich and some poor, Winthrop said, so that “they might be all knit more nearly together in the bonds of brotherly affection.” He argued that no one becomes more honored or wealthy than others “out of any particular and singular respect to himself but for the glory of his creator and the common good of the creature, man.” And if anyone is in need, Winthrop has no doubt of the proper response: “If thou lovest God thou must help him.”
The heralded “city upon a hill” makes but a fleeting appearance near the end of Winthrop’s text, yet it has become a focus of the nation’s political and historical memory. How and why did a sermon promoting localized solidarity, humility and religious devotion evolve over the centuries into a nationalist emblem of wealth, self-reliance and global power projection?
Part of the answer lies in the messy, fascinating process by which history and identity are forged. In his 2020 book, “City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism,” Abram Van Engen, a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, explores the way historical societies, antiquarians and academics unearthed key documents that helped America understand itself, including the Winthrop sermon, which languished forgotten for almost 200 years before it was finally published in the 19th century, only to go underground again until it resurfaced in time for the Cold War.
Van Engen tells the origin story of an origin story. Writers from New England, who wielded outsized influence over early American narratives, privileged the tale of Winthrop’s Puritans, and of the earlier Pilgrims, over those of the English settlement in Jamestown, let alone of the Dutch, French or Spanish arrivals. And for Winthrop’s lengthy sermon to gain influence, Van Engen explains, it had to be truncated, and so the ending became a stand-in for the whole. Even one of Winthrop’s own 19th-century descendants, while collecting his forefather’s copious writings, printed only the last few paragraphs of the sermon.
“For many years,” Van Engen writes, “scholars, politicians and commentators missed Winthrop’s overt language of sympathy at the very center of his sermon, and they did so for a simple reason: it wasn’t there.”
Winthrop’s city upon a hill also appealed because it was an “infinitely malleable phrase,” as Rodgers puts it, and therefore susceptible to political and scholarly reinterpretation. Focusing on Winthrop’s sermon as America’s moral beginning helps locate that starting point in the glossy goodness of the Pilgrims and godliness of the Puritans rather than, say, the commercialism and slaveholding of Virginia’s early settlers.
Stressing exceptionalist self-confidence over Puritan self-doubt also provides cover for however our leaders have wielded this unique mandate. Like claiming manifest destiny over the American continent, no matter that “since the beginning of the United States, the continuing presence of Native Americans has been a constant threat to tales of American exceptionalism,” Van Engen writes, a reminder of how stories of settlers fleeing religious persecution “run up uncomfortably against the colonial terror these same people so often inflicted on others.” Like embracing our identity as a nation of immigrants — at the core of many interpretations of exceptionalism, including Reagan’s — while often slamming the door shut in the name of culture or wealth. Like launching military incursions across the globe and treating any misgivings about such enterprises as evidence of the doubters’ un-Americanism.
American exceptionalism can be morally aspirational. It can also justify whatever we wish to believe about ourselves.
Here we enter the realm of the “usable past,” a notion outlined by Van Wyck Brooks, the 20th-century literary critic, whose 1918 essay on the subject urged American thinkers to look upon the past as “an inexhaustible storehouse of apt attitudes and adaptable ideals; it opens of itself at the touch of desire.” Mining history and literature for a more compelling and useful past “is what a vital criticism always does,” Brooks wrote. In this light, national traditions, even origin stories, can be reimagined and enlisted in the service of the living. After all, for whom else is history written?
It is a risky proposition. Demagogues deploy history for their purposes; both angels and demons can pick that lock. But it is tantalizing as well because, for all the discussions over when exactly America began — say, 1776 versus 1619 — U.S. history is as much a search for our starting thoughts as for our starting dates. Van Engen, Rodgers and Tyrrell all highlight the work of Perry Miller, a mid-20th-century Harvard historian (and one of the founders of the field of American studies) who explored America’s Puritan past not to find an origin moment but, in Van Engen’s words, to find “an expression of origins.” Miller emphasized the anti-materialist and communal aspects of “A Model of Christian Charity,” yet by elevating the sermon in academic and political circles, he enabled Reagan and others to transform it, to turn that usable past into a symbol of wealth and power. (Van Engen speculates that Miller “might well have appreciated” the irony.)
For a while, Reagan’s political and ideological opponents tried to take back the city on a hill. Addressing the 1984 Democratic Convention, Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York declared that America was a “tale of two cities,” even if the shining city was the only one Reagan could glimpse “from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch.” The other city featured families without homes and children lacking education, Cuomo said. “There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you don’t see, in the places that you don’t visit in your shining city.” Four years later, Michael Dukakis mentioned Winthrop’s sermon when accepting his party’s presidential nomination. “Winthrop wasn’t talking about material success,” Dukakis, who was then governor of Massachusetts, said. “He was talking about a country where each of us asks not only what’s in it for some of us but what’s good and what’s right for all of us.” Of course, Winthrop was not imagining a country at all, but these interpretations, however politically motivated, seem closer to the spirit of the original than the Reaganite revision.
By the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the sermon had become central to the American quest for self-knowledge, or at least self-justification, particularly on the right. In 1992, the Republican Party cited the “shining city” in its official platform; in 2012, the concluding chapter of its platform endorsed American exceptionalism; in 2016, the party platform began with these words: “We believe in American exceptionalism. We believe the United States of America is unlike any other nation on earth.”
That belief imposes responsibilities, the party declared. “We believe that American exceptionalism — the notion that our ideas and principles as a nation give us a unique place of moral leadership in the world — requires the United States to retake its natural position as leader of the free world.” The logic is convenient: It’s not that we choose to lead the world, it’s that this belief we hold about ourselves compels us to do so. And this belief is unshakable because the party “embraces American exceptionalism and rejects the false prophets of decline and diminution.”
A false prophet is one who claims, deceptively, to speak for God. An American exceptionalist, apparently, is one blessed with certainty about the designs of providence for our shining city.
No matter how dogmatic our parties and principles, political ideas inevitably encounter the world and either change it or are changed by it; events on the ground will always collide with thoughts in the air. In the last 100 years, the idea of American exceptionalism has retreated, adapted or thrived in the face of major challenges, including the Great Depression, the Cold War and the post-Sept. 11 world.
The economic and social policies of the New Deal, for instance, could have offered a break from America’s individualistic self-image, Tyrrell suggests, but the program’s success instead propelled a new postwar exceptionalism “focused on world leadership, material abundance as the basis of American power and the promotion of economic development abroad.” As a result, the Cold War generations came to regard Winthrop’s sermon “as a call to destiny and greatness,” Rodgers writes, as well as a rationale for U.S. superiority over Soviet communism. And the 2001 Al Qaeda attacks, while ending an exceptionalist sense of physical inviolability, deepened the missionary zeal of a country no longer content with merely exemplifying exceptionalism but intent on spreading that gift. “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one,” Bush declared in his second inaugural address.
In his 2008 book, “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism,” Andrew Bacevich, a historian and retired Army colonel, warned of the “snares” of exceptionalism — how the appetite for freedom and prosperity leads to imperialistic ambition. Writing at a time when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were far from over yet far from foremost in the popular consciousness, Bacevich saw a link between self-perception and self-gratification, between the demands of domestic prosperity and the logic of foreign adventurism. “Sustaining our pursuit of life, liberty and happiness at home requires increasingly that Americans look beyond our borders,” he wrote. “Whether the issue at hand is oil, credit or the availability of cheap consumer goods, we expect the world to accommodate the American way of life.” When exceptionalism is regarded as a birthright, Bacevich worries, realism gives way to hubris, bolstering the belief that whatever we do “serves providentially assigned purposes.”
American presidents have long wondered if we were truly a chosen nation or just a hubristic one. Tyrrell notes that in 1765, John Adams wrote in his diary that the settlement of America was a “design in providence for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.” But more than a decade after his presidency, Adams’s view had evolved: “We may boast that we are the chosen people; we may even thank God that we are not like other men; but, after all, it will be but flattery, and the delusion, the self-deceit of the Pharisee.”
Abraham Lincoln, speaking in Trenton, N.J., in 1861 on the way to his inauguration, said he was pleased to serve as a “humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people.” What to make of that enigmatic “almost”? For Rodgers, Lincoln’s “almost” did not mean “not quite,” as if America only had a few more steps to take before becoming the Lord’s most favored nation; nor did it imply that America had been chosen by God but then failed to uphold its side of the bargain. Instead, the president-elect was conveying something more sobering, Rodgers contends. “He meant a nation that might have been chosen — but for the deep, original sin of slavery.”
Must a people be chosen from the start or can they gradually attain that standing? The answer depends on whether exceptionalism means looking backward with nostalgia or gazing forward with hope, whether it’s about living up to founding myths or about building a city that the founders might never have imagined.
This tension is inevitable in matters of national identity. “Nations needed to promise newness,” Rodgers writes. After all, of what use is an origin story that doesn’t part ways with the past? However, to foster citizens’ loyalty, he explains, nations must “appear to be timeless as well.” This is the dual role Winthrop’s sermon has served for our political class: It explains what we stand for and then says we always have.
For Tyrrell, exceptionalism is not a fact to be proved but a belief that is embraced or rejected by popular acclaim — by a voice vote. It is not the product of empirical or comparative study but, “rather, it reflects the reproduction of belief.” If the United States is exceptional, then it is because we think it is and act accordingly. Exceptionalism, Tyrrell writes, is “a set of sedimentary deposits on American memory.” From time to time, Americans stir those dregs.
In his latest State of the Union address, Biden summed up his version of American exceptionalism. “The very idea of America is that we’re all created equal,” he stated, and that we all deserve to be treated as such. “We’ve never fully lived up to that idea, but we’ve never walked away from it, either.” It is close to Obama’s notion of exceptionalism, which he articulated at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 2015, on the 50th anniversary of the march from Selma to Montgomery. Obama called the United States a “constant work in progress” and said that the “imperative of citizenship” is to love the country so much that you’d risk everything to fulfill its promise. “That’s what it means when we say America is exceptional.”
I am struck by the evolution in the meaning of “we,” as used in our earliest texts and by our current leaders. “We shall be as a city upon a hill,” Winthrop’s sermon says, and that “we” spoke to an intimate faith community. “We the People of the United States,” the preamble to the Constitution begins, but in practice the rights of that “we” would long be limited by wealth, race and sex. Obama and Biden’s “we” is not only more capacious than the others, expanding it ever wider is the point.
The debate over American exceptionalism is not just about determining if we are or are not exceptional but about assessing the scope of that “we,” about deciding whose faces appear in that national self-portrait. Do our stated principles of self-government, natural rights and political equality render us exceptional, or is the fight to attain them the true measure of our uniqueness? This is exceptionalism not as a condition to be affirmed or proved but as an aspiration to be chased with as much zeal as we’re taught to pursue happiness. I don’t know if this vision of American exceptionalism is workable or even true — Obama can call America a “constant work in progress” all he wants, but work, not progress, is the only constant — yet I can’t help but conclude that this vision is necessary.
The alternative on offer today is seductive, understandably so. In a world teeming with threats and unmet expectations, calls for restoring American greatness and placing national interests first sound enticingly like a new exceptionalism, more immediately gratifying than a noble but eternal aspiration. After all, Biden’s slogan “Let’s finish the job” only emphasizes that in the task of building the city, there’s always more work to be done.
Yet the Trumpian alternative does not reaffirm exceptionalism; it undercuts it. It assumes that all countries, including ours, are much the same, struggling to beat one another out, to be bigger and stronger — to win. That notion of greatness, Van Engen writes, “has nothing to do with historic ideals or bedrock values rooted somewhere deep in the American past.” And when national exceptionalism is defined by material gain and relative standing, when our expanding “we” gives way to the “I” of a singular leader, America’s usable past becomes a disposable one.
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